HALFWAY, Md. — The burglarized Buddha of Halfway, Maryland, made headlines around the country last week in the section they label Odd News.

“Buddha stolen from local man,” was the banner in the Hagerstown Herald-Mail. Our local all-news radio station posted the incident on its Internet home page, along with “Toddler drowns in mop bucket” and “Flea infestation shuts down courthouse” and “Two charged in tattoo attack.”

On television, we saw a man named Jim Elliott, 73, padding around his back garden, gesticulating with his cane, utterly confounded by the theft of a 180-kilogram, solid granite statue of the Enlightened One in the middle of the night by a person or persons unknown. We learned that Elliott was not himself an adherent of the Buddhist faith, and that the effigy had been shipped from Korea by a fellow U.S. soldier with whom Elliott had served over there, more than 30 years ago.

“Washington County man offers reward for missing backyard Buddha,” was the follow-up.

Homeowner and U.S. Army veteran Jim Elliott, 73, gazes at patch of dirt where a stolen statue of Buddha used to stand.

Last Saturday morning, I drove to Halfway to meet Jim Elliott and plumb the mystery. Halfway, I discovered, is a district of the city of Hagerstown, about an hour west of Baltimore. Many of the houses sported Orioles flags, encouraging their first-place flock.

Hollywood Road is where Jim Elliott and his wife and their disabled 45-year-old son live in a one-storey house with a cheery assortment of knick-knacks, bric-a-brac, tchotchkes, doo-dads, whimsies, curiosities, and schlock. There is a large above-ground swimming pool in the backyard, and nearby, Jim was eager to show me, is the flattened square of empty earth where Buddha used to be.

It was just behind the back porch, not far from the ceramic skunks, the Jimmie Johnson NASCAR banner, the animatronic frog, the ceramic bunnies, at least a dozen charming garden gnomes, and the life-sized great blue plaster heron. But none of those other treasures had been touched.

“It was there when I went to bed at 11:15 Monday night,” Elliott said. “When I got up Tuesday morning to go get a haircut, it was gone. It just hit me like something hit me right in the gut.”

He showed me the footprints of the thieves and the tread marks of the cart they used to wheel Buddha away.

“It had to be someone who knew we had it,” the victim sighed.

“Do you have any enemies?” I asked him, playing detective.

“None living,” Elliott said.

I asked Elliott about his military career and he told me that he had been required to swear that he would not tell a living soul about it for 99 years.

“I’ll make a note to call you in 2113,” I said.

“Let’s just say that I hit some pretty rough stuff,” the veteran smiled.

Korea, he said, came at the midpoint of a long army career that included Vietnam and several other episodes that he was not at liberty to elucidate. Afterward, he had retired to hometown Hagerstown to work as a security guard at the local courthouse and the social-services bureau.

“It’s tough,” he said, looking again at the plot where the statue used to pose. “You lose that sense of security. It’s probably a good thing that I was asleep. If I had seen them, I would have took care of business.”

He told me that he had asked some friends to keep an eye out on craigslist and eBay for someone trying to fence a solid stone sage. But they had seen nothing, and no one had yet come forth to claim the reward.

I tried to cheer him up and I told him, “You know, Jim, the Buddha teaches that the more you give away, the more you have, and when you have nothing, then you have everything.”

“Well, right now we got just about nothing,” Jim Elliott said.

It was then that I realized that the burglarized Buddha of Halfway, Maryland, was not a lifeless ornament, but a symbol of greater losses, deeply personal and private, that their sufferer and survivor made me promise not to share. Even the Oddest News carried a human side, and all of us had secrets to be hushed for 99 years or more

It is written in the Dhammapada: He who inflicts pain on innocent and harmless persons . . . He will have cruel suffering, loss, injury of the body, heavy affliction, or loss of mind. A misfortune coming from the king, or a fearful accusation, or loss of relations, or destruction of treasures.

Lightning-fire will burn his houses; and when his body is destroyed, the fool will go to hell.

“I hope they catch the people who did this,” I offered, heading out to Hollywood Road.

“I’d like to find another Buddha,” Elliott said, and he went back inside his house